Hardware rendering: Yes or no?

This is more a curiosity question, but I think that it's also interesting for ROM development/ modding.

I have seen lots of tweaks enabling hardware rendering in most custom ROMs since I have my old HTC Desire.
After a few years; stock ROMs still have it disabled by default (afaik) and most custom roms enable it by build.prop tweaks and also modding a lib file.
I wonder what are the pros and cons of this, and what is the difference between enabling it via ROM tweaks and development options in settings.

Staff Member

It should increase performance in Graphical User Interface GUI.
More fluid/smoother then software rendering.

Mi2/S is already rendering GUI with the GPU (graphical chip / hardware)
Support for GPU rendering was firstly (offically) introduced in Android 4.0 and improved with project butter.
Those HW overlays in developer settings is a part of that.

Older android versions didn't support this by default, that's why they tweaked it in the past and sometimes still do